The Indian Premier League 2020 (A Cricket league for our Non-Indian Readers) took place at a dramatic and significant time. COVID-19 was peaking, and a severe 2nd wave was expected. The IPL was a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy state of affairs — meeting pent up viewer demand, and giving advertisers a real avenue to spend. Indeed, IPL 2020 came through, breaking records held by any previous broadcasting property. (Read more.)
Today, we take a look at how brands across sectors performed in this eventful phase.
Food Delivery: A Tale of Twins
Swiggy and Zomato have been slugging it out with each other for a very long time. While Reach (Number of unique smartphone users who have app installed in that month) suggests that Zomato is doing better, what is remarkable is how closely the two track each other across metrics.
Reach of both apps scaled with the IPL and peaked on the date of the IPL final (10 November), declined soon after, and then resumed trend growth.
Interestingly, we see a tight range in the total session time (Time spent in a day) on these food delivery apps; possibly with consumers on average spending the same amount of time in browsing and food discovery. The reason could also be, that the end-to-end process of ordering is probably well optimized (and largely similar) on both platforms.
The number of times an app is opened on average, in a given day (Open Rate) is where the Reach trend is reversed and we see Swiggy doing a better job at being top of mind with more opens per day.
Daily Active Users (DAU) (% of users who open the app at least once in a day) offers the starkest visual of how Swiggy and Zomato are twinning:
Clearly, there’s no winner yet in the slugfest between these two, who continue to consolidate after Uber and Ola/Foodpanda’s exit. This will be an interesting space to watch as user ‘tastes’ evolve.
The OTT Wars
The IPL helped fortify two major OTT players (Amazon Prime and Netflix) as well, who continued to expand their reach; in fact, accelerating closer to IPL finals!
Users consistently spent more time on Netflix rather than Amazon Prime except for the one big spike between October 23 and 26 when the much-awaited Mirzapur Season 2 released; this pulled in more users (improved Reach, higher Open Rate, and more DAU) for longer stretches.
The other trend in here is the Dec 5–6 spike in Netflix usage following their free ‘Stream Fest’. This helped Netflix narrow the Reach lead created by Amazon Prime thanks to Mirzapur 2.
Payments: a new player wants a share of your ‘wallet’
The Wallets/Payment app space was shaken up in this period with the emergence of Cred.
At just over 3%, CRED’s Reach may appear trifling compared to PayTM’s 60+% and PhonePe’s 55% but it is growing faster. CRED is also an Official Partner for the IPL and has clearly benefited from the association!
DAU rates for CRED also seem to be improving though they remain far behind PayTM and PhonePe. Considering the nature of transactions on each of these apps (CRED is used for larger, one-off payments v/s routine transactions for the other two), this is to be expected.
The trend of using apps for ordering food, learning, making payments, or watching movies has gone from unimaginable to nascent to a norm now. As choices explode, winners and losers will start to get filtered.
If you want to get rich insights on your customers or competition, get in touch!
Thanks for your time,
Aman
+91–981818029
